Tech Forum

http://www.geocities.com/sidebysidescriptures

Made a new thread because I just wanted to make sure Thedqs and whoever else it was that wanted this got the message that now their problem is solved. If I correctly understood what they wanted, that is. If you don't like having to scroll over every time to click on New Testament or whatever book you want, just block the front page images: http://scriptures.lds.org/en/mainimage.jpg , http://scriptures.lds.org/es/mainimage.jpg . AdBlock for Firefox will do this; there's some similar plug-ins for IE, like Avant Browser.

Thanks for a demonstration of the concept. It would be great if this kind of side-by-side polyglot scripture reading could be built right into scriptures.lds.org.

One of the difficulties of using frames is that it is hard to make them scroll simultaneously so that you are looking at the same verses in each language at the same time. And even if you can manage to get javascript to coordinate the fame scrolling, because some verses end up taking up more lines in one language than they do in another, simply scrolling to the same point does not necessarily allow you to view the same verse.

I recently became aware of another implementation of this idea at http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/bookofmormon/.

For yet another example, check out the Parallel Bible at bible.crosswalk.com . Crosswalk also has a nice Interlinear Bible for reading the English translation along side the original Hebrew and Greek, if you are willing to download the Hebrew and Greek fonts.

If the church technical team were to implement either of these concepts, they wouldn't want to make users download fonts. Rather, they would want to set the character set for the scriptures web page as well as the source data to UTF-8 so that it could support the various characters needed to display the jots, tildes, and alphabets of any of the various languages side-by-side on the same page.

(Parenthetically, a view-source on the new lds.org shows that it may already be using UTF-8 since the content-type meta tag lists the charset as UTF-8. However, scriptures.lds.org does not define a charset at all. Does anyone know if there are plans to present the scriptures website in UTF-8 in the future? )